Information Technology Systems
Typically, users engage computers to facilitate information processing. A computer operating system enables and facilitates the ability of users to access and operate computer information technology. Information technology systems provide interfaces that allow users to access and operate the various systems.
User Interface
The function of computer interfaces such as cursors, menus, and window components are, in many respects, similar to automobile operation interfaces. Automobile operation interfaces such as steering wheels, gearshifts, and speedometers facilitate the access, operation, and display of automobile resources, functionality, and status. Computer interaction interfaces such as cursors, menus, and windows similarly facilitate the access, operation, and display of computer hardware and operating system resources, functionality, and status. Operation interfaces are commonly called user interfaces. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) such as the Apple Macintosh Operating System or Microsoft's Windows provide a baseline and means of accessing and displaying information.
World Wide Web
The proliferation and expansion of computer systems, databases, the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web (the web), have resulted in a vast and diverse collection of information. Various user interfaces that facilitate the interaction of users with information technology systems (i.e., people using computers) are currently in use. An information navigation interface called WorldWideWeb.app (the web) was developed for the NeXTSTEP operating system in late 1990. Subsequently, information navigation interfaces such as web browsers have become widely available on almost every computer operating system platform.
Generally, the web is the manifestation and result of a synergetic interoperation between user interfaces (e.g., web browsers), servers, distributed information, protocols, and specifications. Web browsers were designed to facilitate navigation and access to information, while information servers were designed to facilitate provision of information. Typically, web browsers and information servers are disposed in communication with one another through a communications network. As such, information servers typically provide information to users employing web browsers for navigating and accessing information about the web. Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator are examples of web browsers. In addition, navigation user interface devices such as WebTV have also been implemented to facilitate web navigation. Microsoft's Information Server and Apache are examples of information servers, i.e., their function is to serve information to users that typically access the information by way of web browsers.
Hypertext
Information on the web typically is provided through and distributed employing a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) specification. HTML documents are also commonly referred to as web pages. HTML documents may contain links to other HTML documents that can be traversed by users of web browsers by selecting the links, which are commonly highlighted by color and underlining. HTML has been extended and upgraded resulting in new standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and other such variants, which provide greater functionality.
HTML documents typically are accessed through navigation devices via a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is a stateless application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems, and is further described at the World Wide Web Consortium organization (W3C) web site in a document entitled HTTP Specifications and Drafts (available at www.w3.org/Protocols/Specs.html).
The basic web browsing paradigm presents users with a scrolling page full of text, pictures, and various other forms of information media such as movies and links to other documents. Web browsers allow users to access uniquely identified HTML documents on the web by entering a navigation location in a Universal Resource Locator (URL) and employing HTTP as a transfer protocol to provide and obtain web pages. Typically, a user provides the address of a desired HTML document into a URL (either directly or through the selection of links in an already viewed HTML document).
Commerce System
The rise in Internet usage has resulted in a tremendous increase in transactions occurring through communications networks such as the Internet, i.e., an increase in on-line transactions. The increase in on-line transactions has been facilitated by commerce systems.
Most systems for processing the sale of products, are seller-driven, whereby the seller prices, packages, configures and offers the product for sale, and the buyer decides whether or not to accept the seller's offer. In a buyer-driven commerce system, on the other hand, the buyer dictates the terms of the offer and one or more sellers decide whether or not to accept.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207, owned by the assignee of the present invention and incorporated herein by reference, discloses a buyer-driven Conditional Purchase Offer (CPO) Management System that processes binding purchase offers received from individual consumers. The purchase offers contain one or more buyer-defined conditions for the purchase of goods or services, at a buyer-defined price. The purchase offers are typically guaranteed by a general-purpose financial account, such as a debit or credit account, and thereby provide sellers with a mechanism for enforcing any agreement that may be reached with the consumer. The purchase offers are provided by the CPO Management System to sellers, for individual sellers to either accept or reject. If a seller accepts a purchase offer, the CPO Management System may bind the buyer on behalf of the accepting seller, typically by charging the general-purpose financial account designated by the buyer or providing the account information to the accepting seller for processing. Thus, the CPO Management System empowers individual consumers to obtain goods and services, such as travel or insurance services, at prices that are set by the consumers. The CPO Management System provides numerous commercial advantages to sellers as well. For example, the CPO Management System permits individual sellers to effectively sell excess capacity when actual demand fails to meet forecasted demand. In particular, the CPO Management System provides an effective mechanism for sellers to be confident that if they accept a consumer's offer, the consumer will purchase the requested goods or services at the agreed-upon price. Yet, the consumer remains unable to use the information to ascertain the seller's underlying level of price flexibility, which, if known to a seller's competitors or customers, could dramatically impact the seller's overall revenue structure.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,085,169 entitled “Conditional Purchase Offer Management System,” which issued to the assignee of the present application and is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, discloses a CPO Management System that permits sellers to provide proprietary rules for the acceptance of CPOs. Each of these rules establishes one or more restrictions that the seller is willing to accept for a predefined minimum price. The rules are utilized by the CPO Management System to determine whether to accept, reject or counter a CPO on behalf of a particular seller. In this manner, the CPO Management System can respond to submitted CPOs in real-time on behalf of sellers, with a minimal amount of expensive, time consuming and error prone human intervention. For many transactions, the embodiments of the CPO Management Systems discussed above, will effectively complete transactions between buyers and sellers, with minimal intervention by the parties once the CPO has been submitted.
Reporting Systems
Reporting systems exist that allow administrators to generate reports. Brio Technology, Inc.'s Brio software allows administrators to construct and generate reports. Such software requires the skill and time of a skilled administrator to construct various queries that form the basis of various and subsequent static reports.